Day One at Groovy & Grails eXchange 2013

The day one at GGX 2013 London was really awesome. The atmosphere, the sessions and the speakers really made the day wonderful. We could feel the buzz and energy of the thriving and closely knitted Groovy/Grails community all day long. The show was very well managed by Skills Matter and nicely driven by Peter Ledbrook.

Here are some of the highlights of the day:

The Groovy Update – by Guillaume Laforge:

In this session, Guillaume talked about some of the advanced features of Groovy 2.2 release such as implicit closure coercion, AST transformations (such as @Memoized), few GDK and Groovy shell enhancements. He then talked about the new features to be shipped with Groovy 2.3 release foremost being the ‘traits’ which gives the ability to define the methods in the Java interfaces. The presentation can be downloaded from here.

DEVQA – by Alvaro Sanchez:
This session addresses the issue of ‘eternal ambiguity’ over who should write the test code (esp. Functional tests) for the large projects: whether it should be written by developers or QA engineers. The speaker talked about the process which he follows in his project so that the developers and QAs can have their different set of testing tools and can live happily together.

Modern Groovy Enterprise Stack – by Marcin Erdmann:
In this session, the presenter talked about new technologies that he has used in his current Groovy/Grails project. He talked about the usage of Spring Integration, RabbitMQ, Dropwizard (for RESTful web services), Gradle, Spock, Jenkins and Grails to create, test and deploy a scalable and modular mesage driven architecture.

NoSQL with Grails – by Joseph Nusairat:
The talk revolved around the emergence and embracing of NoSQL datastores in the techonolgy stacks built to handle humongous (and highly unstructured) amounts of data. The speaker talked about some of the cool features of MongoDB (the one that I liked the most is GridFS) and how you can integrate it with your Grails app.

Polyglot Programming in Grails 2 – by Jeff Brown:
An excellent session given by Jeff Brown detailing the capability of Grails framework to accomodate the code written in any of the JVM scripting languages. In this talk, he demostrated the execution of the code written in Clojure scripting language inside the Grails app via the use of Grails Clojure plugin that he has written himself. Isn’t it interesting? 🙂

Making Java APIs Groovy – by Cédric Champeau:
In this session, Cédric Champeau talked about ways to add Groovy sugar to existing Java APIs. He carried the audience step by step through the DSL building technique where each step was an improvement over the previous step. The session covered usage of Groovy Categories, ExtensionModules etc.

Architectural Flexibility With Groovy – by David A. Dawson:
In this session David A. Dawson talked about the factors which could influence the architecture of the applications, and how Groovy can give much needed flexibility to the applications. The speaker emphasized on the importance of understanding the problem “context” in order to be decisive about choosing an approach. The session discussed about usage of APIs, Events, REST, User DSLs while trying to solve the architectural problems.

Ratpack: A Toolkit For JVM Web Applications – by Luke Daley:
In this session Luke Daley showed us how to create a simple application using light-weight, high performance framework, Ratpack(built in Java). Luke made use of Guice and Gradle to create a basic web application. The sample application covered request/response, get/post, request params, using (injecting) services, rendering the views/json and finally testing.

Message Driven Architecture in Grails – by Dan Woods:
In this session, the speaker discussed about how the Message Driven Architecture can improve the modularity, reusability, scalability and maintainablity of the appplication. In this session Dan used an example of Hotel searching and booking usecase. He made use of a Message Driven pattern based on Spring Integration and showed by example the usefulness of the pattern.

Most of the session podcasts can be seen by clicking on ‘more…’ links at Skills Matter website here.

Looking forward to a new day of explorations and learning at GGX’13 tomorrow.